The invention relates to a computer based video system.
Computers have been used to edit and create video programs using digitized video. Owing to the large amount of data involved in even a single frame of video, it is typical to compress the digitized data. One compression format that is used is JPEG, which involves compressing the data on a frame-by-frame basis, permitting edits to be easily made at frame boundaries on the compressed data. Another compression format that has been used is MPEG, which can be used to partially compress the video into so-called I-frames, which rely only on the information in a single frame, or to fully compress the video into IBP frames, which rely on the information in subsequent and prior frames. Full MPEG encoding achieves a higher level of compression, though edits cannot be easily made on the fully-compressed videos.
Some computer based video systems have relied on software compressors to compress video data while others have used compressors/decompressors implemented in integrated circuit chips.
In computer based video systems, a hardware frame buffer is often connected by a direct hardwire connection to a graphics subsystem for display of the frame buffer contents in a window on a computer monitor in an overlay mode.